Portfolio : Web/Interface Design
Main Squeeze Natural Foods Café
The Main Squeeze is a restaurant dedicated to high-quality vegetarian food and sustainable business practices. My goal for the site design was to reflect the organic, natural foundation for the business's practices and whimsical, restless creativity of the owner herself.
The owner had experienced issues with a previous version of the site that was built as a custom PHP application, and wanted a new site that would allow her to directly manage its content with frequent updates. After much research and experimenting, I settled on a hybrid site that incorporates one component of the old PHP site--a dynamic mechanism for daily specials--while using easily-updated HTML and CSS for the site's main structure. For the most-frequently updated part of the site, the news section, I plugged in a customized Blogger site that will allow the owner to add news updates in an easy, intuitive manner. The latest news items are then pulled back onto the home page as links via an RSS feed.
These and various other details of the site's construction result in a site that is not "locked-up" or reliant on my particular expertise to update. The site is built using techniques and tools that are widely accessible and have a readily-available support community, ensuring that the site will remain flexible for the long term, whether I'm involved in it or not.